The official Akismet blog

New Akismet.com site design

Akismet was the very first commercial service released by Automattic. 5 years later, Akismet.com was still running with exactly the same design it’s had since day 1.

That it still looked good was a testament to the strength of understated design. Still, we thought it was about time to freshen things up with a brand new design – and a new signup process to go with it.

I wanted to point out something: There is a accessibility problem with the site. Clicking on the logo will not take you to homepage, because it is not really a link, but rather a CSS “curson:pointer” trick. Except the fact that it makes you click on it repeatedly with no results, at the time you figure it will take you nowhere clicking on it, you realize that here is not other link on the page to take you to homepage. I think you would like to know that :)

The new design seems very good to me. Congratulations to the people who worked on it — and I’d be curious to know who you are. :-)

One thing I am not quite certain about is the pricing policy. I remember the old site said you needed a commercial licence if you made “mad paper”, which it generously defined as $500/month for a site.

Has that changed now? For example, if I have a blog that makes $100/month from ads, do I need a commercial licence now?

The “mad paper” rule was always confusing. It was a guideline for individuals considering the Pro Blogger license (it’s always been the case that businesses need a license). We wound up with a great many people running Akismet on sites that are clearly commercial, but claiming that they weren’t making any money from them. It didn’t seem fair to us to us that we should ask honest individual bloggers to pay when that was happening.

So instead we dropped the $500 text and changed it to reflect our intent more closely: if you’re running a site that promotes a business or product, we consider that a business and think you should pay for Akismet. If you’re an individual running a personal blog for the sake of blogging, the choice is up to you.